2018-12-13 所属栏目:科学美国人

Imagine you're an aphid, a tiny insect that sucks plant sap for a living. You’re munching away when a cow comes along to munch on the same plant you’re on. You feel it

2018-12-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

<CLIP: "As all of you know, today we are keeping faith with the future. I'm about to sign a proclamation that will establish the Grand Staircase&ndash;Escalante National Monument.

2018-12-10 所属栏目:科学美国人

If you have a dog, you&rsquo;ve probably tried to train it. The basics, like sit and stay. Plus, of course, not to go to the bathroom on your rugs. And if your dog learns things qu

2018-12-07 所属栏目:科学美国人

If you go by ticket sales, the most popular film of all time is Gone With the Wind. <Gone with the Wind clip: "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."> That is adjusting for inflat

2018-12-06 所属栏目:科学美国人

Blue whales are the largest animals ever to exist on Earth. But they're still tough to track. Because they live underwater where we can't easily see them--and often in remote are

2018-12-03 所属栏目:科学美国人

You've probably seen those little cards in hotel rooms: towel on the floor if you want a fresh one, towel on the rack if you'll use it again. And using towels more than once mean

2018-11-28 所属栏目:科学美国人

“InSight has passed through peak deceleration, telemetry shows the spacecraft saw about eight G&rsquo;s.” “Radio science reports carrier detected.” [Applaus

2018-11-22 所属栏目:科学美国人

The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the driest spots on Earth. Sometimes, you can't see any life at all.

"As I was a kid those drives were very boring&hellip;because there was

2018-11-20 所属栏目:科学美国人

When a friend comes to you after a stressful day, how do you comfort them? Do you let them rant? Do you pour them a glass of wine? Those could work. But a new study finds that a ve

2018-11-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

It lives in south-central Utah. And it&rsquo;s huge. In fact, it is thought to be the largest living thing on the planet. It&rsquo;s a stand of trees, a field of aspens all clones

2018-11-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

Immigrants to the U.S. might lose touch with certain customs and traditions back home. But here's something else they lose: their microbes.

"When they came to the U.S. almost im

2018-11-15 所属栏目:科学美国人

Hi, I&rsquo;m Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky. And here&rsquo;s a short piece from the November 2018 issue of the magazine, in the section called Advances: Dispatch

2018-11-14 所属栏目:科学美国人

A baby's laugh is unmistakable: <CLIP: baby laughter> But aside from its squealing, high-pitched quality, there's another factor that sets a baby's laugh apart from ours: babies

2018-11-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

Six years ago, the fish ecologist Rodney Rountree was on a skiff in the Peruvian Amazon. He was holding a piranha in his hand&hellip;underwater&hellip;in a river filled with other

2018-11-09 所属栏目:科学美国人

“So humans are really really good, or at least Western traditionally educated humans are really, really good at categorizing things into types.”Jennifer Raff. She&rsquo

2018-11-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

If you're a giant panda, this sound <CLIP: Panda Bleat 1> means romance.

"I wouldn't call it a romantic serenade <laughter>" Megan Owen, a conservation biologist at the San Dieg

2018-11-07 所属栏目:科学美国人

“I think if genome sequencing gets just super cheap then it&rsquo;s&hellip;probably very soon going to make sense to just sequence all your DNA.”

Science journalist C

2018-11-05 所属栏目:科学美国人

As you unwrap a Halloween candy or two, it's worth paying your respects to the real reason for many of the treats: a tiny fly whose trick is to make chocolate possible.

"They'

2018-11-01 所属栏目:科学美国人

The oceans are getting louder. And coastal areas are some of the noisiest, as in this underwater recording, captured 17 miles off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland. <Maryland boat

2018-10-30 所属栏目:科学美国人

When humans take the drug MDMA—best known as ecstasy—they feel a deeper connection to others—emotionally and physically. Because MDMA affects serotonin, a nervous

2018-10-23 所属栏目:科学美国人

Hi, I&rsquo;m Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky. And here&rsquo;s a short piece from the October 2018 issue of the magazine, in the section called Advances: Dispatche

2018-10-22 所属栏目:科学美国人

Only a few kinds of animals are known to learn their vocalizations from listening to others. Us, of course. Elephants. Bats. Cetaceans—whales and dolphins. Pinnipeds—wa

2018-10-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

Health care isn't just a benefit of the modern human age. It goes way back. All the way, even, to the Neandertals.

"We imagine they would have been cleaning wounds, dressing woun

2018-10-18 所属栏目:科学美国人

Are you an agreeable person—you know, a nice guy? If so, a logical follow-up might be: how are your finances? And here's why: "Agreeable people have lower savings, they have

2018-10-16 所属栏目:科学美国人

Last summer's total solar eclipse sliced right through Columbia, Missouri. "It was remarkable. As a biologist I generally reserve that word 'remarkable' for biological phenomena